YouSaid · the spoken record

L.A. Paul

lines on the record: 111
first: 2025-02-20
most recent: 2025-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, I honestly don't know where I formed the idea that this was going to be the thing for me. I love to read. And when I was in high school, I read Herman Hesse, like the glass bead game. I read other kinds of interesting books. I remember I read it. I liked Alexander Solzenitsen's work. And these are like philosophical texts in maybe not class, you know, not analytic philosophy, but there's a lot of philosophy in there. And so I do think that this reading and other things I read led me to realize that a certain kind of”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My husband at the time wanted to have children, so that sort of tipped the balance. I'm not sure what I would have done if he had been equally ambivalent”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before my son was born, and I was like, wait a minute. Actually, my daughter was only very young. I was like, wait, this actually was really when after I had recovered from giving birth and started getting enough sleep so I could think clearly again. I was like, wait, this was an utterly bizarre, strange metaphysical experience. And I mean metaphysics not in the aura shaping way, but like metaphysics like I do. Like the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways. And also epistemologically, you know, to change so much about how I experience and represent the world. This is just so foundational. But philosophers never talk about this. No philosophers talked about this, at least not in my tradition. And I thought, I have to talk about this, which, by the way, I think Alice talked about this, was very scary because I'd built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher talking about the nature of causation and time. And then I was going to talk about babies. I had to steal myself. So yeah, so to answer your question, there was a lot of ambivalence, but then.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can expect what you're expecting, and so many other parenting things that I looked for. I mean, I tried to do it, I couldn't do it, but I didn't know I couldn't do it until I actually had the children. And then I was like, oh, this is nothing like what I was going to expect. And then that was when I had this moment.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have children. Some people just feel like their life wouldn't have meaning with that. I never felt that way. I just thought this would be one interesting good way to live one's life. But then I had this desire to spend my time doing philosophy and also philosophy is a male-dominated field, and it certainly was back in the 90s. And there was definitely a professional cost to having a child. And I think there still is. It's not as bad as it used to be. I don't think people think you're less serious now, although I think they used to think that. But you still have less time. and you have less money. There are clearly professional implications. Maybe for women in particular, but I think everybody, you're not solely devoted to your projects anymore. Somebody else is more important. So there was a kind of ambivalence. And so I thought, well, being a rational thinker, I'm going to evaluate it, right? I'm going to think about what it's going to be like. I'm going to make my choices. And that was where it all fell apart, right? That was where I was betrayed by.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was complicated because, on the one hand it's funny when I was younger I never wanted children and then when I hit my twenties I think I thought oh that's a real possibility like I would love to be happily married and have a family but it seemed a bit remote too like I liked I thought that seems like an option for me and it would be a good option but I also really want to you know study philosophy and spend as much of my time as possible doing fossy this is the kid I guess I was still a kid then you know reading people's books and writing like you know basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every two weeks this took a lot of time because I had to read it I didn't have any training and I would write all this stuff and I was just obsessed I was also doing other things at the same time like I was still reading being in time so I spent all of my time doing philosophy and I didn't want to change that so on the one hand I had a desire”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that could be a beautiful thing, but it could also be a very time consuming, very painful thing, right? And I don't know, you could pursue your intellectual passion and it could fall flat or it could just turn into this like amazing opportunity. So there's just a lot of chance involved in any of these choices. Yeah, I don't think you either have children or find God because I think there's so many other really interesting things people can do with their lives. And I look at the person who I try to look at the person who I would have become if I had not had children. That person is very different from who I am now along some dimensions and very much the same with who I am. But I can't really get into her head. I don't really know what she would have been like. But I'm also sure she would have lived like a super fun, interesting life.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which one feels more appealing to me? I don't know in many of the most salient ways what any of these lives could be. Like, I don't even know how it's going to fill out because there's so many chancy things about each of those. You know, you could have a child that's disabled.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you might say, well, these are different risky choices. And if you want to maximize your expected utility in some sense, maybe you should choose door one. I may actually think that seems kind of reasonable to me in a certain way if you're truly indifferent between these different options. I think people rarely are indifferent. But the further problem is they're not indifferent. And yet there's a sense in which they don't really know what they're choosing between. That's the further complication. So again, going back to what I was saying is it's more like which life do I want to find out about?”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Siberia together, you know, and it very rarely works out that way, right? So if you do cross the plains with the baby, you're slower. When the wolves follow you.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure there are different species of transformative experiences. So what I heard you asking me, part of that question involved, well, look, you know, maybe we can rely on biology in a certain way or we should, this is a time-tested solution. So you can pick transformative experience, one, transformative experience, two, transformative experience three. Behind door one is having a child. Behind door two is traversing, you know, like you're traveling the world, seeing all the wonders, whatever, exploring, you know, having lots of money to spend on travel and satisfaction, that kind of thing. Behind door three is pursuing your intellectual passion, let's say, you know, to the fullest degree, devoting all your time to that. I could go on, but there's three options there. And I do think that choosing one of those involves trade-offs on the others as much as some people might say, oh, do it all. I'll have a child and we'll cross the plains.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, and you are going to change who you are. And so then the question is do you want to discover that new way of living? And if you do, with all the pluses and minuses, all the suffering, because I think transformative experience is almost always involve suffering of some sort, then you go for it. And if you don't, which I think is also perfectly reasonable, then you don't. And because I don't think it's a matter of rationality, so I think just because some people have children and they're super happy that they did, it doesn't mean that that's just true for everyone, even if it would be the case that for almost everyone, they would reform themselves so they would be happy with their choice. There's no inference the best explanation there just because many vampires testified to being happy that they've become vampires does not mean that everyone should become a vampire, especially somebody who just finds that way of being alien.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In so many funner ways. Okay, so I want people to articulating the conceptual framework that's involved and diagnosing why this is, there's a kind of incoherence in having to try to make this choice where you're supposed to know what you're doing is part of the solution. Maybe it's just something that we have to accept. Now in my book, here's my unpopular solution. My unpopular solution is to say, well, maybe we can reframe the choice so that when we're making a choice, So this presumes that we have enough information to know that there's at least a very high chance that it's going to be at least pretty good as opposed to a very high chance it's going to be terrible or bad or whatever. We use evidence in all kinds of reasonable ways to know that kind of thing. But when we're confronted with something like, do I want to go to war? Do I want to emigrate to another country or do I want to have a child or pick your favorite case? Do I want my child to have a cochlear implant? You alluded to that earlier. You're not going to be able to know what it is.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's happening, then it's a bit like I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep and flailing might be the only response. And I also think this is just part of what it is to live a life and to be human. And it's perfectly legitimate to pass on transformative experiences. But part of living a life and being open to possibilities involves choosing some of them for most people. And also things happen to us that are like this that we don't choose, like terrible accidents, for example. There's a philosopher named Paul Sagar who's been writing a substack on he was a climber and he had a catastrophic accident and his writing is beautiful and he talks about he's paraplegic now. No, he's quadriplegic and the life change that that involves is clearly transformed if and clearly horrible and he wouldn't have chosen it and that makes sense but he has to now discover this new way of being an agent basically because he lacks so much agency.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a very intimate way when you go into labor. And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. What I'm trying to say is that I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer. And”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That undergo them. And I think what's really important is to recognize how problematic they're that they don't fit the ordinary framework because people, like Alice talks about, she agonized. I agonized. And for me, I was really annoyed because I agonized and I didn't get anywhere. And then I had a baby and I was like, oh, none of the things I was reading, which is why what you can't expect when you're expecting so satisfying because I hated what you could expect when you're expecting. It was the worst book ever. It answered no questions for me whatsoever. None of it addressed what I wanted to know. And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? Okay. I'm sorry. I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It wasn't for me. Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when I was like starting to go into labor and I was like, oh my God, this enormous thing has to come out of me. How's that got to happen? Like I knew theoretically that that was going to happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I mean, in the neighborhood I live in, this would not be an unusual type of thing like Brooklyn, you know. And that's by way of thing. And I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to give people any answers. I'll just be able to sort of talk to them about like the conceptual framework for that choice. And if that's of interest, not clear to me that would be of interest. Then maybe I have a possible side gig. And really what I'm saying is that, all right, I'm much better at raising questions than answering them. I do have a view. I don't think very many people like my view, but I'm going to tell you my view. I still like my view. Well, I don't like my view. I just think it's like I haven't come across anything better, which isn't exactly the space you want to be in. So what I really think is that it's a special class of experiences. It's not like every experience is transformed, but I really don't think we could talk about the reason why that's the case. I think there's a fairly well-defined class of certain kinds of life experiences that can count as transformative, not for everyone, but for many people.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I live part of my time in New York and part of my time in New Haven. And in New York, the neighborhood I live in is kind of a funky neighborhood. And I've toyed with the possibility of like on Sundays hanging out my shingle and being like, I specialize in transformative experiences and big life choices. You could book time with me to discuss your philosophical life choice if you'd like.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things are not always good when transformation does not entail. There's a kind of popular conception of transformative experience involving a kind of epiphany and that kind of thing. And that can happen for sure. But the way I'm talking about transformative experience, it's not always like that. Remember that whole thing about like, you suffer. I mean, you kind of don't mind it, but you certainly suffer. Isn't aside”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so normally when you're confronted with, oh, do I want to do something? Do I want to try this kind of ice cream or do I want to have this cup of coffee? You don't change in the process of trying it. So after you do it, you can kind of assess, oh, I liked it. Oh, it was good. That's meaningful to you beforehand because you know that you're going to stay constant through the change in your circumstances, like tasting the new kind of ice cream. But in this case, having the experience, let's say tasting the new kind of ice cream was going to like rework your flavor profile so that you would just like a whole bunch of different things after that. Well, that changes the state that you're in at the same time. And so your act and your state.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe doesn't want to have a child or really is unsure, and they know that if they choose to have a child, they're going to be super happy with that result, but they don't trust the fact that in virtue of like becoming a parent, it's going to kind of rewire them in their preferences in a certain way, right? Sure, I'll be really happy, but I don't know if I want to be that self right now, given who I am now. And I can't understand in a really deep way what it's going to be like to have that child. So I have to kind of, you know, leap over the abyss or leap into the abyss, I guess, if I want to do it. So if you find yourself in that situation, what you're confronting involves what I describe as a violation of act, state independence. Okay. So here's where the technical part comes. You've got the intuitive idea. Act, state independence involves very roughly a distinction between the act that you're performing and the state that you're in, or that's how I'm going to interpret it here. There are different ways to interpret it, but this is the way to do it here.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So there are these new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience we've had before. And so that means there's just a sense in which we can't kind of from the inside kind of imagine what they're like, even if someone can describe. Try to describe to me like what it's like to see red and you see the problem right away. We just don't like language just kind of gives out if I haven't seen red before. I have no color vision. Okay, so there's a sense in which we kind of can't see through a certain kind of veil. And across that veil, the self that we're going to be the kind of person that you're going to realize is just like really different. So you can't just assume you're going to be basically the same. This puts us into the situation where you're making a choice for your future self. And that future self might have preferences that are super different from your current self. And by definition, and this breaks, so now here's a little technical bit. So we talked about the intuitive idea. I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who doesn't”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a way of capturing the puzzle, as you said. So given the fact that these are new kinds of experiences, so a kind of experience you've never had before. And I compare this to like Mary growing up at a black and white room and seeing color for the first time or Thomas Nagel talking about like you can't understand like for a bat what it's like for a bat to be a bat.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience, and I don't think it's just having a child, I think, like deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country, maybe getting some kind of, if you're diagnosed with some kind of disease and getting some kind of like radically experimental treatment, there are lots of things that can count as transformative. But if you don't know what it's going to be like on the other side of that experience, and you know it's going to make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien, I don't know how we're supposed to make that decision if it's up to us. We can't use the ordinary models that we use for rational decision making because those assume that you can see through the options to assign them value and model them for yourself and choose in a way that's going to, as you say, we say it in a technical way, maximize your expected value. And if you can't assign value and you can't really understand what it's like to be this kind of a self, then that procedure just doesn't work.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something that's life changing, but also where you change the kind of mind you have in a certain way or what you care about most in a certain way that means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien version of yourself. Like someone who's alien to you now and who you might not even want to be now, even if once you become that person or that version of yourself, you're super happy. If I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future stuff, I could have looked at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids. I got up at 4 a.m. every day for years to write before my children woke up. I mean, no one ever told me that that was something I would want to do. And if they had told me I would have denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before noon when I was a graduate student. And I did it willingly. Something happened. I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not even clear what their testimony applies. Okay. So that's my example. And my favorite application is to becoming a parent because speaking as someone who wasn't quite clear about whether they wanted to have children, I have two children and I love them very much and I'm very happy. But there's something about becoming a parent that makes you like producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very, I mean, I love my children. I wouldn't exchange them for anything else in the world. You know, if I'd gotten pregnant a month later, I would have loved that child too. But there's no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had. You just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way. And you would never change what you've done. And that's awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires. Okay. So I think, you know, also you don't get, you know, you stay up a lot at night, right? There are many similarities. Vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience, like a life-changing.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it would be like to do that. And I'm sure it hasn't escaped your thought. It certainly didn't escape my imaginings that, well, maybe there's something about being a vampire that makes you really happy to be a vampire. So maybe like when you become this other species, there's some kind of biological evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you're a vampire.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the way that I think about it then is I continue the story and it's like, okay, so you rush back to your Airbnb and you start calling people or texting them, telling about what happened to you, and you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires. So then you immediately want to find out, well, wait, tell me about what it's like. Like, what's it like to be a vampire? Do you like it? Should I do it? And they tell you that they love it and it's fabulous and it's totally incredible. But they also tell you you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire as a mere human. They say life has meaning. It has a kind of purpose that, you know, is exquisite. But until you become a vampire, you can't possibly understand it. You lack the capacity. So you're like, okay, thanks. So what do I do? Because if you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire, then you either have to do it just because all of your friends do it and they say it's great. And they tell you they think it would be great for you. But there's no way you can actually kind of conceive of.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, reasonably. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm not Okay, blind with satin, but it still might be a bit hard for my mattress preferences. But the idea is that these things, while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right? And I think in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it. Like you will thirst for it, right? And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from like sucking the blood of their human compatriots. So that's quite alien. And wanted to kind of bring out how... Don't enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different bridals. Like it'd be some kind of fancy wine. But if you became a vampire, you would.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Like, there are certain obstacles, but in general, yeah, for all intents and purposes, immortal. And so this seems pretty cool, but they're not human. You'd have to exit the human race. You have to sleep in a coffin. You can't enjoy the sunshine anymore, and you have to drink blood. And I try to separate out some of the ethical questions. So let's say it's artificial blood or the blood of humanely raised farm animals or something like that. Still, right now, it's pretty cozy.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then he says, go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight, and if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open, and if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back. So I see this as a really interesting possibility because, you know, vampires are sexy. They look great in black. They have amazing powers. They probably have different kinds of sense perception. Yeah. Virtually. I mean, as long as they stay away from villagers with some things they have stakes and like that.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the way that I think about this is I imagine, or you imagine, I ask you to imagine, traveling through some part of on your summer vacations, traveling through some part of Europe, and you decide to explore a castle, you're in Romania, let's say, and you go down to the dungeons and Dracula comes to you, and he says I want to make you one of my own. I'm going to give you a one-time only chance. You could become one of my followers. It'll be painless. You'll enjoy it. In fact, but this is a one-time only chance and it's irreversible.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience. Maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it's an especially good way to kind of illustrate the concept. And also because it's not a real life, I don't think vampires are real. And the beautiful thing about a thought experiment is you can design it the way that you want to kind of illustrate the structure of a concept. But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases. My example, I'm just going to tell you. Yeah, let's go.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you know, people have their preferences. I mean, I think that's the most basic thing. I also think the role of philosophy is to kind of uncover or discover some of the most fundamental truths about both human beings and about the nature of the world. And that's a beautiful thing to be able to study. Like, it's so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About what does identity through time mean? Like, what even is time? You mean by a point of view? Like, what's so important about the way that we experience ourselves in time? Lots of stuff. And so the primary goal, I think, of philosophy is to kind of teach you how to think about these things. But there are lots of other important things. Like I teach a class here at Yale that I think of as sort of like philosophy of mind for computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, as well as philosophy majors, because it's all about showing how really interesting kinds of philosophical concepts are coming up all the time now with like artificial intelligence and all the questions about what it means for a machine, you know, could a machine be intelligent, do LLMs have any kind of knowledge? What is chain of thought reasoning? Why is this helpful? All kinds of things that really actually, if it's framed the right way, people see are super relevant to the work that they're doing, even engineers who don't tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group. No shade on engineers. It's just”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy. And there's the question is, what is it in general? And then what part of it am I interested in in particular in my career? And I mean, I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles. In particular, its most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things. And that involves, this goes back to analytics philosophy's weirdness. You can't think about something unless you have some kind of conceptual framework for it. got to be able to like provide some structure to your thoughts in order to, you know, something like, okay, what are you going to take as fundamental? What do you take the framework to be here? What does this apply to? What do my terms mean? And even just doing that can teach you an awful lot about something. So I wanted to think about like the nature of time and how the mind embeds itself in the world and how we understand ourselves as selves in time. And to do that in a productive way, I absolutely had to learn a bunch of stuff.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Oh, I would read a chapter and I'd be like, but what about this? And this seems wrong to me, and I can't understand this. I don't know why you did that. And I don't have any of that material anymore. I'm sure some of it was the kind of like was raw, you know, like kind of dumb question material. But I think some of it was not bad. I did think it through really, really carefully. And I'm, you know, reasonably intelligent. And so I think I was able to come up with an interesting kind of challenging 20-page discussion of their chapter. So they would write back to me these long and their letters back to me were always very long, like at least 10 pages, sometimes more.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other two immediately said yes, and the plan was for me, and all of them had recent books, so I just worked through their books chapter by chapter and like just worked crazy.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, okay, sign me up. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were a few other things you had to have some professor had to sign off or whatever, but Quentin signed off on everything. So he said, well, you want to do some course equivalence. Why don't you do something in the philosophy of time? I have this friend. He does philosophy of time. He'd work with you. He'd be great. And I said, great. So that was straightforward. And then we said, well, how about I want to choose some female philosophers because there's hardly any. I'd like to work with some women. And so I went to the bookstore and looked at the philosophy section and I found two books, recent books by female philosophers, one in philosophy of mind and one in philosophy of science. And I said, what about these two? And he said, okay, great. Write to them. And I wrote to another person as well who did logic. And I was going to work with her as well. But I did not have the background. It became clear because I didn't have like logic requires, she's a very sophisticated logician. And she would want me to do something at the graduate level for this. And I'd never even taken basic logic. So that was like kind of a no-go, but it didn't matter.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a science background. I was very interested in the nature of time. And I had been working with Quentin on the philosophy of time. So Quentin was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his intellectual discipline and what he worked on a variety of things. He didn't fit into the mainstream philosophy. And that was actually great for me because I didn't fit in either. And he was open to that. And he helped me. So I talked to Quentin. He said, well, I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs. So the thought was I'm going to Antioch College had this basically a degree by mail where you could get an individualized master of arts. You pay the university some enormous amount. It wasn't that much, but it seemed like a lot to me. And then you had to kind of do your own thing. And as long as you did your own thing, you would get this master's degree.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know exactly exactly. I mean, and I took out student loans to do all this and I had earmarked that money. It was all fine. I didn't object. I paid Antioch College much more, or Antioch University at the time, much more than that amount, that degree was like, I just basically, I paid them money so that it was official, but the people who really did the work. Didn't make anything.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I offered to pay them, and they all said yes. And then at the end, I said, okay, I'm going to send you the check, and only one person took it. And I don't want to out that person.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I looked at some of my. Yeah, it resonates. And I looked at some of my philosophical heroes, which would be Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, because these are people in the field who have really managed to develop things. And also, never mind my early failure to appreciate Descartes. Later on, like Descartes and Hume, all of these philosophers, there's a way to understand their work using very simple examples that brings out the heart of it. Actually Gideon was really good at that, like teaching Hume, for example. He just really could bring that out. So I was like, okay, this is what I can do. This is what I'm going to do. Or at least I'm going to try”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's been my goal. That is my goal. It's incredibly hard. So, yeah, exactly. Well, that's true. I guess that's what people do. No, it's incredibly hard to do that, try to capture these ideas. So that's the take. And I think I've been so happy because people seem to get it. Like it seems to be.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Developing the ideas that would capture the content in an intuitive way. And partly it's because when you're trying to do something new, and I am trying to do something new and I was trying to do something new, you have to be guided by a kind of gut instinct and understanding that it's right. Because I think if you haven't got that gut instinct, it's really easy to lose track. So the thought is, well, if I'm going to do this, approach this topic, I have to approach it in a way that kind of follows, like that I deeply intuitively grasp and that I, especially when I'm confused, I can kind of reach back to that. And if it's really right, I should be able to explain it to somebody without a technical apparatus. But then I should also be able to embed it in that technical apparatus and use that to draw out the consequences in an especially precise and interesting and rewarding way and then take it back to the intuition. And that is what I have tried to do. I'm happy with my results. I'm not going to promote myself, but I think...”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my dad always felt that, like, he liked to read pop science, and he always felt like it was really important that people learned about the kinds of intellectual education, like the kinds of intellectual activities that people did. He was fascinated by astronomy in particular and the nature of the universe and physics generally. And so there was a part of me that thought, well, I have to pair a search for precision with a way of...”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think that because in a quest for kind of clarity and precision, sometimes if that's the priority and I respect that as a priority, it can be easy to leave other things aside. But my approach is different. I mean, I do technical work on causation. I do collaborative work with computational cognitive scientists. Like there's plenty of stuff that's maybe a little bit less accessible than the transformative experience work. But there, because with that book and with the work I've been doing subsequently, I was returning to my roots. I was there wanting to do, I wanted to approach the topics that made me go into philosophy and that I find deeply meaningful. And I thought, well, I have to pair the search for rigor with accessibility. And maybe some of it comes from my father because my father, see, you're getting personal stuff now.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally fantastic. And so I think the teaching does really matter, and very few people are lucky enough to be introduced to philosophy by Gideon. But I think it's also the case independently of teaching ability or teaching focus, that analytic philosophy is, there's a sense in which, well, it's not unfair to call it a kind of intellectual masturbation in certain contexts, or it can seem like that or can descend into that. I'm not going to deny it at all. And I'm not going to deny that I might also kind of fall into that in various kinds of contexts when I'm hanging out with the right sorts of people. But I think it's also really important. You might have to cut that if I say. It can be very rewarding. Okay. You don't have to cut it. Okay.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know exactly what you're talking about. Getting as an amazing teacher, he's actually like one of the best people to talk to to get a sense of an idea and get it framed. And you can see immediately like what the main idea is why it's important and what the problems are as well.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, completely legit. Yes, you'll discover that the sentence snow is white is true, if and only if snow is white. I mean, you know, come on. I mean, that's actually very important. But as a matter of, I'm just going to give you a better background. Like, so I went to Princeton for my PhD. Amazingly, they let me in. I was this crazy person, okay? And then we could talk about that. But they let me in. And I was a TA teaching fellow for Gideon for that class.”
2025-02-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT